This blog looks at news items and views and indicate the impact on the middle classes. The middle classes are over-taxed, over-worked and over-exhausted. Yet if they don't join hands and move, they will get more of the same treatment from the existing parties. This is a call for political action. This party may not yet be a political party.Its a party nevertheless to what is happening. And this party is ON!
There is now a linkedin group called Party for the Middle Classes

Sunday, April 12, 2015

The middle class pétition contre la réforme du collège

I don't know who started this petition, but here goes.

First, a word of explaination that collège in france is not university but
middle-school. In France, middle school concerns classes 6, 5, 4 and 3.
This is equivalent to Indian classes 6, 7, 8 and 9.

After many years of
living in Dijon, we finally found some bilingual classes so that our kids
could be internationally communicative and more globally at home. Guess
what? The "réforme de collèg"e wants to clone all our kids into a
standardized mould, and to stop these bilingual classes.

I think this kind
of standardization can be done by the private sector. (In France, the
private sector in education is often just public curricula outsourced).
But to provide the kind of excellence in diversed education that we need
to be globally competitive, we need the State to pool in public resources
to offer the diversified offerings in many differerent regions: at least
one per department. This would provide some amount of economies of scale,
which private education cannot provide.

Of course, there may be a role for
truly private education and for NGOs to fill in this void. But the cost
for most people would be huge. I think the reform therefore is quite
elitist and caste-ish. Rich people who can afford the kind of private
education to make their kids bilingual get a big edge over the middle
classes who are being forced to join the ranks of those whose kids are
being limited to one language.

But this kind of protection for the
existing rich does not mean that their kids will actually be competitive.
Far from it: with the forces of globalization, they will actually suffer
from the lack of local competition which the middle class could have
provided them. Instead of levelling down education for the bright, perhaps
France should have thought of increasing the level for all.

Anyway, I
invite you all to join this petition so that our last kid also manages to
get some notions of English early in life.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/P%C3%A9tition-contre-la-r%C3%A9forme-du-coll%C3%A8ge/1591757194374194?fref=ts